A story about an aristocratic aesthete and the foibles, inconsistencies, and uncertainties of love.
First published in 1889 Guilderoy was reviewed favourably by Oscar Wilde in the Pall Mall Gazette: “Ouida is the last of the romantics … She tries to make passion, imagination, and poetry part of fiction. She still believes in heroes and in heroines. She is florid and fervent and fanciful. Yet even she, the high priestess of the impossible, is affected by her age. Her last book, Guilderoy as she calls it, is an elaborate psychological study of modern temperaments. For her, it is realistic, and she has certainly caught much of the tone and temper of the society of our day. Her people move with ease and grace and indolence. The book may be described as a study of the peerage from a poetical point of view … It is a resplendent picture of our aristocracy… The central figures are exaggerated, but the background is admirable. In spite of everything, it gives one a sense of something like life.
What is the story? Well, we must admit that we have a faint suspicion that Ouida has told it to us before. Lord Guilderoy, ‘whose name was as old as the days of Knut,’ falls madly in love, or fancies that he falls madly in love, with a rustic Perdita, a provincial Artemis who has ‘a Gainsborough face, with wide-opened questioning eyes and tumbled auburn hair.’ She is poor but well-born, being the only child of Mr. Vernon of Llanarth, a curious recluse, who is half a pedant and half Don Quixote. Guilderoy marries her and, tiring of her shyness, her lack of power to express herself, her want of knowledge of fashionable life, returns to an old passion for a wonderful creature called the Duchess of Soria. Lady Guilderoy becomes ice; the Duchess becomes fire; at the end of the book Guilderoy is a pitiable object. He has to submit to be forgiven by one woman, and to endure to be forgotten by the other. He is thoroughly weak, thoroughly worthless, and the most fascinating person in the whole story.“ (17 May 1889).
In his book Byron & the Victorians Andrew Elfenbein makes a connection between Guilderoy and Wilde’s Dorian Gray. “Examining his 1889 review of Ouida’s Guilderoy demonstrates how much Ouida’s writing was a model for Dorian Gray” and suggests that “the titular hero … sounds like a cruder version of Dorian.” (Andrew Elfenbein, Byron & the Victorians, p.236).
Features hyperbolic advert for ‘Eno’s Fruit Salts’ with a depiction of “Marie Antoinette’s Last Grace”; the advert on the verso asks, “what is more terrible than revolution?”, the answer? “Outraged nature!” So Eno’s Fruit Salts puts forward the argument that their effervescent remedy is a catch-all solution for all the ailments of 1890s life.
Pencil ownership inscription to title-page, “Fothergill 1900”. Wear to head and tail of spine, extremities lightly rubbed, rear hinge starting, otherwise a nice bright example of a ‘yellowback’.
